Videogames & Futurama, Part 2: How Zoidberg Got His Name From a Game

Apple II geeks, listen up. Did you know that Futurama creator David X. Cohen named a character after an Apple II video game that he created? Or that he wants your help to get the game, called Zoid, up and running again?

Cohen created the game, inspired by Atari’s Qix, as a high school student. He’s still got the original Apple II diskette, but he says there might be a problem getting the data off them.

"Most of the copies I made, probably including the one I still have, employed primitive copy protection, in which the program checks for a bad sector on the disk before it will run," says Cohen.

"If the disk could be read, someone familiar with 6502
machine language and the Apple II + OS would probably have to look through the program and fiddle with those disk-access sections," he says.

Any Apple II geniuses out there have a solution to Cohen’s problem? More details below.

All this week, we’re presenting outtakes from an article for Wired about the return of Futurama.
Many of the people who write for the show are gamer geeks.

This installment deals with how ship’s doctor Zoidberg got his name from a videogame. The details are below.

Before he was cocreator and showrunner on Futurama, before he was a high school math whiz, David X. Cohen was an ardent arcade gamer. "One time I was playing GORF," he recalls, "This kid behind me turned to his friend and said, ‘These Chinese guys are really good at video games.’ I…guess that was a compliment."

Perhaps unsurprisingly the mathematically inclined writer’s favorite game was Qix, in which players use the joystick to draw a line that subdivides the screen, in an attempt to fence off more than half of the play field.

"It’s pronounced kicks, like the cereal, but I pronounce it quicks," says Cohen. "I spent so much money on it that I can call it whatever I want."

Qix was the inspiration for a game he developed himself in high school called Zoid. It was an Apple
II game he spent 2 years coding in Assembly language. He was so pleased with it that he sent it off to the hottest game publisher of the day: Broderbund. They actually sent him a reply, but he knew instantly that his hopes were cruelly dashed.

"Dear Mr. Cohan," it began. If they couldn’t even spell his name right, they probably didn’t want to publish his game.

But the game Zoid achieved a sort of immortality when Cohen and Matt Groening were shaping the concept for the show that would be Futurama. Cohen, an ardent Trekkie, believed that their show should have some sort of doctor character like "Bones" McCoy on Star Trek. But whereas McCoy is continually forced to treat weird aliens, the doctor on Futurama would himself be a weird alien with no understanding of human anatomy.

While he and Groening were in Florida watching a space shuttle launch, Cohen decided to name the doctor character after his old video game. Doctor John A. Zoidberg became a fan favorite on Futurama.

In his office at Matt Groening’s production studio, Cohen shows me a 5.1 inch floppy diskette with a hand-made label reading Zoid. He says that he employed the poor man’s copy protection technique on it, pushing a pin through an unused sector of the floppy disk. I asked him if he’d ever be interested in getting some geek to take his old Zoid diskette and dump the ROM so he could play it again on an Apple II emulator. He replied:

Yes, I’d be very interested. However, it could prove quite tricky. For one thing, the disk is 24 years old… I don’t know what the half-life on those 5.25-inch disks is. For another thing, most of the copies I made, probably including the one I still have, employed primitive copy protection (as we discussed), in which the program checks for a bad sector on the disk before it will run. The bad sector either had a pinhole in it, or was simply left unformatted. The program also wrote the all-time high scores to disk… I’m not sure how the emulators deal with that. If the disk could be read, someone familiar with 6502
machine language and the Apple II + OS would probably have to look through the program and fiddle with those disk-access sections.

I throw it open to you, Game|Life readers. Is it possible to dump the ROM from a floppy diskette formatted for Apple II with pinhole copy protection?

(Oh, and to everyone who loves the show—buy the new DVD Bender’s Big Score already. It’s very funny, and the special features are terrific, and they won’t make any more episodes if you meatbags just swipe it off of
Bittorrent.)

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